Parting Breath Read online

  The Superintendent, needless to say, never let a little matter like practical considerations come between him and his enquiries. ‘And who else,’ he asked, ‘could have got there and back without being accounted for besides Colin Ellison?’

  ‘A great many people,’ replied Sloan grimly. To all intents and purposes, everyone who hadn’t actually been locked up by Palfreyman in the Almstone administration block since the sit-in started.

  ‘I hear,’ remarked Leeyes conversationally, ‘that they’ve still got old Wheatley there.’

  ‘I know,’ said Sloan slowly. Nobody needed to be too imaginative to guess the sort of gibes that would come the way of the police when news of Dr Wheatley’s incarceration got known in Calleshire.

  ‘I did think they’d ask us to get him out,’ said Leeyes, ‘but they haven’t.’

  ‘Talk about law and order,’ muttered Sloan.

  ‘Ah, talk about it … that’s easy,’ said Leeyes sagely. ‘It’s the doing that’s difficult.’

  ‘At least we know where Dr Wheatley is,’ said Sloan. ‘That’s more than we can say for some of the others.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Professor Mautby.’ Sloan pulled his notebook out of his pocket with his spare hand. ‘He came into College to go to his laboratory just before all this blew up.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘He knows. I don’t. He’s sitting there saying he’s only working and doesn’t know what all the fuss is about.’

  Leeyes granted. ‘What about the others?’

  ‘Neil Carruthers, Roger Hedden, Tomlin and old McLeish all seem to be at home.’

  ‘“Don hypocritical, Don bad, Don furtive, Don three-quarters mad …” Where did I learn that, Sloan?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, sir, I’m sure.’ In his time the Superintendent had been to so many evening classes that you could be sure neither of what he did know nor of what he didn’t.

  ‘Professor Watkinson we’re looking for now. He’s Modern History. He’s still not back from giving a lecture to the Calleford Historical Society.’

  ‘It’s getting late.’

  ‘As he’s a bachelor,’ said Sloan, a note of irony creeping into his voice, ‘no one knows if he’s expected back tonight or not.’

  ‘As a married man,’ said Leeyes instantly, ‘I can tell you he’s got a lot to be thankful for.’

  ‘And Peter Pringle,’ said Sloan, ignoring both his own wife and her condition. ‘He’s the Librarian.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He is said to be away for the night,’ replied Sloan. ‘In Bodley.’

  ‘Is that’, enquired Leeyes truculently, ‘the same as in Chancery?’

  ‘In Oxford,’ said Sloan. ‘It’s another library.’

  ‘Well, find out if he’s still there. The Oxford police,’ said the Superintendent, still being difficult, ‘will understand. They’ve had a university there even longer than we have.’

  ‘Then,’ persisted Sloan, ‘there’s Miss Hilda Linaker.’

  ‘Not there?’

  ‘Not anywhere,’ said Sloan worriedly.

  15 Hit

  ‘Chinese take-away,’ announced Detective Constable Crosby, dumping a collection of small cartons down on the table belonging to the don whose room at Tarsus College they were using. It was a very beautiful oval table made of rosewood – a fact which appeared to have completely escaped the notice of the constable.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Sloan meaningly, looking at his watch, ‘that you’re waiting for me to ask what kept you.’

  ‘There’s not a lot of other drivers on the road, sir, not this time of night.’

  ‘That I can well believe,’ said Sloan with some spirit. ‘When they see you coming they get off it if they can.’

  ‘Sweet and sour,’ announced Crosby, concentrating on opening the first package.

  ‘Was it,’ enquired Sloan, still doing some calculations with time and distance, ‘a personal best?’

  ‘Luston to Berebury, sir, yes.’ Crosby sounded satisfied. Driving fast motor cars fast was about the only aspect of his police work known to really interest the detective constable: he was always trying to beat his own course record in the country.

  ‘Damage?’

  ‘Ah … bean shoots.’ Crosby appeared to be giving all his attention to the food. ‘Damage, sir?’ he said assiduously. ‘What damage?’

  ‘Suppose,’ said Sloan implacably, ‘you tell me.’

  ‘A hen. At least I think it was a hen.’ He opened the next carton. ‘Oh, good! Chicken.’

  If Detective Constable Crosby saw no incongruity in this, then Detective Inspector Sloan saw no point in underscoring it.

  ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

  ‘There was a bicyclist, sir.…’

  Sloan groaned. ‘Don’t tell me.…’

  ‘Chop suey. That’s nice.’

  ‘Crosby!’

  The constable squinted at him uneasily. ‘He might write in.’

  Sloan breathed out. ‘As long as he’s alive to tell the tale.’

  ‘He looked a bit upset.’

  ‘Is that the lot? Nothing more?’

  ‘Lychees,’ said Crosby, still opening packages and ignoring the carefully cherished patina of the rosewood.

  ‘Somewhere,’ observed Sloan mordantly, ‘there is someone who loves that table.’

  ‘What table?… Oh, sorry.’ He produced a handkerchief of young bandanna proportions and colour and mopped away.

  ‘I’m glad you had time for the shopping as well,’ remarked Sloan astringently. He’d just worked out Crosby’s average speed: what the upper level had been he didn’t dare think.

  ‘Velly quick service,’ said the constable, grinning. He pushed a mélange of what he had brought back in Sloan’s direction. ‘Here, sir. Try this.’

  It wasn’t an hour at which Sloan usually ate. If he had been asked he would have declared that he wasn’t hungry. To his surprise neither factor stopped him eating with relish. Buddha might have managed on a single grain of rice a day: Sloan found several hundred more satisfying. By the time he had finished eating, the world looked a slightly more promising place.

  The same feeling must have overtaken the detective constable, too, because he said quite cheerfully, ‘Just Miss Linaker missing, sir?’

  ‘Isn’t that enough?’ growled Sloan.

  ‘Nobody else, I mean?’

  ‘Not Professor Mautby anyway,’ said Sloan with feeling. ‘He’s still over in his precious laboratory. He’s been there for half the night. I’ve got someone watching him now – not that they can see much of what he’s up to. And I daresay they’d understand less if they could see more.’

  ‘I don’t suppose that there’s anyone here that would understand it, sir, even if they could see,’ said Crosby comfortably. ‘They say he’s very clever. Miss Moleyns told me that Henry kept on telling her that.’

  ‘Professor Watkinson,’ said Sloan, consulting his notebook, ‘finished his talk to the Calleshire Historical Society just before ten o’clock and then went off with all the men on the Committee for a drink at the Tabard in Calleford. Nobody seems to know what’s happened to him since closing time.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the constable expressively.

  ‘Ah, indeed,’ echoed Sloan.

  ‘He could be anywhere, then.’

  ‘Mr Peter Pringle,’ said Sloan, one eye still on his notebook, ‘is said to be spending the night with an old friend at Oxford and driving back first thing in the morning. The Library opens again tomorrow.’

  ‘Just the milkman on the road, then, if you’re early enough,’ said Crosby knowledgeably.

  ‘You’ve got a one-track mind,’ said Sloan – and immediately regretted it. In a university it should be the others who went in for the double meanings: not the police.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ It was impossible to tell if the pun had registered.

  ‘And Colin Ellison …’

  ‘“A Hard Day’s Night,”’ observed C
rosby suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a song title, sir.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s us, isn’t it?’

  ‘Crosby, are you having me on?’

  ‘No, sir. Honest. It’s the title of a song. I just thought it’s us, isn’t it, sir? We’re having a hard day’s night, aren’t we?’

  ‘If we’re going in for titles,’ said Sloan grimly, ‘Crime and Punishment has a lot to be said for it. Now, where was I?’

  Constable Crosby wasn’t exactly making the hard day’s night any easier himself but Sloan saw no point in going into that.…

  ‘Colin Ellison, sir’

  ‘Master Colin Ellison,’ said Sloan with determination, ‘whether he likes it or not, is spending the rest of the night under lock and key at the Police Station.’

  ‘So he’s accounted for,’ said Crosby.

  ‘Everyone else,’ said Sloan, suddenly weary, ‘is either at the sit-in or in their own beds because we’ve checked, but without exception they could all have got over to Luston before you did.’

  ‘And one of ’em’s a murderer. Lychees, sir?’

  The two policemen were interrupted by the jangling of the telephone bell.

  ‘Your call’s through, sir,’ said Crosby, handing over the receiver, ‘to something that sounds like Petty France. Can that be right?’

  It was a strange place-name for the office of Her Britannic Majesty’s Passport Office. Sloan would have been the first to admit that. After a moment or two on the telephone he was also, to his surprise, prepared to admit something else.

  That our civil servants are wonderful, too.

  In their own way, that is.

  The young man on night duty in the Passport Office sounded alert and co-operative. ‘Not a simple loss, I take it, Inspector?’

  ‘Stolen, we think,’ said Sloan, ‘from a house in Luston, Calleshire, earlier this evening. There are, er, other troubles.’

  ‘Ah, I see. Well, our first concern would be that no one uses it to leave the country with –’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘If you will excuse me for a moment.…’

  Sloan hung on. The young man, too, had his priorities. He must have had his accustomed routines as well, because he didn’t keep Sloan waiting long.

  ‘Now, Inspector …’

  ‘We’d like to know when it was issued,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Two years ago last July.’

  That figured. Henry Moleyns’ first trip abroad had been with his school. For tasters.

  ‘And to check that it hasn’t been handed in or reported as lost,’ said Sloan. He was too old a hunter to be caught chasing wild geese.

  ‘Moleyns, Henry Arthur …’ The young man seemed to be consulting some sort of card index. ‘No, Inspector, we do not appear to have any note of that happening.’

  ‘It was never likely, I agree,’ said Sloan. ‘He only got back home on Monday from his bicycle trip round Europe and he would have needed it then.’

  ‘Our water guard would have seen to that,’ said the young man quaintly.

  ‘This passport,’ said Sloan, firmly ignoring the archaism, ‘tell me how far he could have gone with it.’

  ‘Any country in the world,’ said the civil servant promptly, ‘except those requiring a visa as well.’

  Definitely not the same, thought Sloan to himself, as going where the ’ell you liked.

  ‘Where would he need a visa for?’ he asked curiously.

  The voice in Petty France drew breath. ‘The Iron Curtain countries … the Bamboo curtain countries …’

  It was very nearly, decided Sloan, the same as the lights going out all over Europe, this coming down of curtains around continents.

  ‘The Middle East …’

  Sloan didn’t blame them there. A perpetual tinderbox; the only wonder, that there was not more trouble in the Middle East than there was.

  ‘Most South American countries …’

  It was their exit facilities that usually interested the police more than their entrance ones. The small print of extradition treaties was equally closely studied by both the criminal fraternity and New Scotland Yard’s legal department.

  ‘The United States of America …’

  ‘This visa,’ said Sloan. (‘Give me your tired, your poor …’) ‘Tell me what it looks like.’

  ‘It’s usually a full-page stamp on the passport.’

  ‘Done by?’

  ‘The Consular Office of the country which the passport holder proposes to visit.’

  ‘And that office,’ said Sloan slowly, thinking hard, ‘would therefore be the only place which would know whether such a visa had been issued?’

  ‘That is so,’ said the young man.

  ‘And without the passport we wouldn’t know?’ That was saying the same thing in different words.

  ‘If by “we” you mean the United Kingdom government …’

  ‘I do.’ He didn’t always, but he did now.

  ‘Then that is so.’

  Never a man to stand on ceremony, Crosby had finished the lychees.

  ‘Moleyns had been somewhere,’ announced Sloan, putting down the telephone, ‘and my guess is that it showed on his passport.’

  ‘So no passport,’ concluded Crosby simplistically.

  ‘No passport,’ said Sloan, ‘which proves that someone didn’t want anyone to know where he’d been.’

  ‘Even after he was dead,’ remarked Crosby, licking a stray splash of lychee juice from his finger.

  ‘My guess is that he went somewhere you need a visa for,’ said Sloan. He looked round the room. ‘Do you suppose the comfort-lover that lives here possesses anything as ordinary as an atlas?’

  They eventually found one on the bookshelves. Crosby laid it on the rosewood table. ‘Where do you want to look?’

  ‘North-west Europe. We think that Moleyns got as far as Cologne.’

  ‘Cologne.’ The constable turned up the index. ‘“See Köln.”’

  ‘Then do that thing.’

  Crosby dived into the index again. ‘Page 48, M 48 + 509.’

  ‘Latitude and longitude,’ said Sloan, putting his finger on Cologne without difficulty. ‘That’s where Miss Moleyns had his postcard from.… Wherever he went, I reckon he brought something back with him.’

  ‘Something flat and thin,’ supplied Crosby.

  ‘Something that would fit in a book.’

  ‘Catch-22,’ said the constable.

  ‘The book is immaterial,’ declared Sloan as grandly as Lady Bracknell ever did.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Something that could be used as evidence of where he’d been,’ continued Sloan, working it out as he went along, ‘or of what he’d found when he got there.’

  ‘That he didn’t want anyone else to know about,’ supplemented Crosby.

  ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t have hidden it,’ agreed Sloan.

  ‘Blackmail?’ said Crosby.

  ‘Blackmailers don’t usually make appointments with the Chaplain,’ said Sloan, ‘but there’s always the first time.’

  ‘Somebody was ready to tear the place apart, sir. You should have seen Miss Moleyns’ house.’

  ‘So it was important,’ mused Sloan. ‘I don’t think we need be in any doubt about that.’

  ‘More important than Henry Moleyns’ life,’ said Crosby trenchantly, ‘because he got killed for it.’

  ‘He got killed before he could tell the Chaplain, remember.’ Sloan was still pursuing his own train of thought.

  ‘Before he could tell anyone,’ came Crosby’s antiphon.

  ‘He tried, though,’ said Sloan, his mind going back to the darkened quadrangle and the girl Bridget Hellewell. ‘Didn’t he?’

  ‘But “twenty-six minutes” was as far as he got.’ Crosby tidied up the remnants of their impromptu meal and said prosaically, ‘It’s not a lot to go on, sir, is it?’

  ‘What I think we had better do next,�
� said his superior, ‘is to concentrate on finding the Professor of English Literature.’

  It was quite possible that out of all those of and having business to do with the University of Calleshire only Matron, serene in her calling and secure in her sanatorium, slept really well that night. Certainly the slumbers of Dr Herbert Wheatley were very nearly as troubled as those of Shakespeare’s King Richard the Third the night before the Battle of Bosworth Field.

  True, Dr Wheatley was not visited by visions of the avenging, but his sleep was still an uneasy one. In the first place, the administrator’s chair was no substitute for his own interior-sprung mattress, and in the second, the Almstone administration block did not compare with his own bedroom for peace and quiet.

  As the night wore on, the noises off died down and even the more frenetic students sought some sleep. It was quite another sensation that then came between Dr Wheatley and perfect repose.

  It was one quite unfamiliar to the good doctor.

  Hunger.

  In this he differed from the undergraduates. Apparently sustained by a mixture of excitement and coffee, they ate little during their occupation: and were in any case used to eating as and when they could catch a meal. Dr Wheatley’s digestive system was accustomed to both regular work and the soporific nightly bonus of the College port (laid down – with an eye to the future – by Professor McLeish when declared vintage). Without either sustenance or quietening mixture, the Dean’s digestive juices sent signals of distress to their owner throughout the night.

  Another source of disquietude had been Malcolm Humbert.

  Malcolm Humbert, sometime student, had come through from the sit-in to have a chat with him. It was many years since Dr Wheatley had enjoyed talking to any man after one o’clock in the morning; and never to the Malcolm Humberts of this world. ‘Talking’ was perhaps an exaggeration. Humbert spoke and Dr Wheatley listened – for a time, anyway. Then, with a technique perfected over the years at tutorials and committees, he stopped listening.

  It was the nearest that he came to real sleep that night.

  Dawn on the Friday morning was observed by more people than those who usually took note of it. For one of them it was to be the last dawn that person was going to see.

  The policemen on guard in the grounds round the sanatorium saw it first, shook themselves stiffly and thought about bacon and eggs in their canteen. The Vice-Chancellor saw it from his bedroom window and thought about newspaper reporters. Colin Ellison saw it through his cell window in Berebury Police Station (‘that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky’) and thought about what he was going to say to someone later that day.